January 13, 2013

A bad, vague Saturday turned into a productive, happy one when I went early to the studio and made more progress mastering the pastels. I painted hyenas, whatever that implies. People wandered in while I was working and commented on the light, and I wanted to stab them, and then they wandered out.

Marco delivering a few pieces and measuring the space for a table he’s making for me. I wanted simply to give him the money. The objects are. . . well, I wouldn’t say a burden, exactly. . . .not what I would acquire under normal circumstances.

Read a book on Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagans that I got when I was trying to sell our books to Chan Gordon. It did, finally, founder under the weight of the author’s over-selling of his speculations about Brooke’s unexpressed inner psychology. He was like a politician who had certain “talking points” and was always reminding himself to “stay on message.” Psychological analyses of literary figures–or of anyone else, for that matter-- are always wrong because early on psychology got into the habit of supplying simple, summarizing terms for complex patterns. By their very limiting and summarizing nature, these terms are always wrong in application, though helpful when cautiously applied as part of a system of understanding. Once Delany (was it?) got the term “self-divided Puritan” into his teeth he couldn’t let it go. Brooke, of course, was no such thing, though the aspect might have passed through him once or twice, as it does most all of us. I don’t think I’m ever a self-divided Puritan, but it might be in there somewhere. A biography of me would decide I am a– what? I have no idea. The comfort would be that whatever finished that sentence would be wrong.

The streetlight behind DJ’s has been replaced. No more stumbling to the cars in utter and scary darkness, but also no more stargazing in the back alley.